


teenage blue

by flwrpotts



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, F/M, I have a Lot of feelings about the summer, everyone is sad and in love, how I spent my summer vacation: the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 06:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16383239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flwrpotts/pseuds/flwrpotts
Summary: She sits on the rickety wooden bench and just watches, the businessmen leaving for New York and college kids coming home for the weekend, the realm of possibility that exists in those iron tracks. If she needed to, she could buy a ticket and disappear, sink into mystery like Jason and Midge and every other beautiful teenager that made it out of Riverdale the hard way.She won’t do it. But she could, if she ever needed to, and that knowledge is a medicine, a tiny hatch in a windowless room.OR."how I spent my summer vacation," 5 ways





	teenage blue

i. elizabeth cooper

It is the summer of pretending.

Betty’s always been good at games of make believe, at throwing herself into the illusion hard enough for her to start to believe it. She can remember playing explorers or detectives with Jughead and Archie as children for days at a time, recoiling when her parents would address her as _Elizabeth_ at dinner.

The best liars are the ones who don’t even realize they’re lying, the ones who construct a new reality and stubbornly, insistently jam it into being.

Betty pretends that she does not see the seductive allure of Edgar Evernever and she pretends that she does not notice the shuttered darkness in Veronica’s eyes and she pretends that she is not scared, that terror does not rock her to sleep and then slam her back into consciousness, an ocean she cannot swim through.

It is shockingly easy to invent a therapist.

Betty prints a business card printed from the Internet and a few online reviews of a psychiatrist in Missouri, fingers crossed behind her back and stare set not to blink. It doesn’t matter- Alice waves away her explanations with a breezy hand, so astoundingly different from the strict, hawkish mother that she misses and loathes in equal measure.

The victory of Dr. Glass is bittersweet, but the fabrication keeps her stocked up with orange pill bottles, capsules of pills that taste dry going down but bloom into something like magic when they dissolve into her bloodstream.

Adderall, once an inconvenience, another symptom of Alice’s control, is now the only thing that makes her feel like herself again. Her old self, not the girl with the serial killer father and batshit crazy sister, not the one who had a baseball bat taken to everything she thought she knew. The Betty who was smart and fast and efficient, the one who followed a ruthless schedule with a startling ease, the one who was in _control._

That girl is gone now, shattered by a bullet on July 4th and a mystery that she should have stayed far away from. But for six hours, Betty can have the flickering ghost of her back, can wear the floral dresses and parse through legal documents and feel that steady thrum of anticipation.

Betty hasn’t told any of her friends about the ruse, yet, if only because she knows if she were to try and explain it out loud, it would sound much worse than it actually is. She can see it, if she imagines- Veronica’s forehead crinkling, Jughead’s mouth twisting downwards with concern. There is already so much to worry about.

The downside of this arrangement is that she has to find a way to fill the gap of time where she is supposed to be in a fictitious therapist’s office over in Greendale without anybody seeing her.

The two weeks she spends in her car, the too-conspicuous baby blue convertible, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and paging through the autobiography of Anais Nin. But the third, as she is wandering the suburban streets of adjourning towns, she finds herself at a train station.

It’s a tiny, run down building, all crumbling cement and withered ivy. But there’s something strangely appealing about it, and Betty cannot help but go inside, read the list of departures and arrivals.

She sits on the rickety wooden bench and just watches, the businessmen leaving for New York and college kids coming home for the weekend, the realm of possibility that exists in those iron tracks. If she needed to, she could buy a ticket and disappear, sink into mystery like Jason and Midge and every other beautiful teenager that made it out of Riverdale the hard way.

She won’t do it. But she _could,_ if she ever needed to, and that knowledge is a medicine, a tiny hatch in a windowless room.

That’s where she is, the third Thursday of July, sweat beading in the back of her lavendar dress, watching a riotous group of kids from a day camp clamber through the station, going on a trip into the city.

They’re little, not much older than third grade, and something wrenches in her ribs as she watches them, giggling with one another and skipping in circles, all dirty sneakers and scabbed knees. She thinks of her in third grade, white blonde ponytail and Nancy Drew books, Jughead in third grade with skinny legs and quiet mannerisms, Archie in third grade with a Spiderman backpack and chipped front tooth.

Betty closes her eyes, and she pretends.

 

ii. jughead jones

It is the summer of scraping by.

It’s a state of being Jughead is all too accustomed to, that teetering on the edge of a dark spiral downwards, that just on the cusp of being _okay._ The truth is that he is exceedingly terrible and mind numbingly happy all at once, running back and forth between grief and high delight.

Archie’s trial is a messy, drawn out example of all the ways that justice can falter and lapse, can disappear into incomplete sentences and forgotten memories, hard evidence nothing more than a broken promise. It is a lesson that Jughead doesn’t need to be taught twice, not when he spends evenings winding through a shitty campsite with his father gone panciking because _what about winter what about cold what about land violations-_

And this is when Betty will appear, with that magical, brain numbing quality that makes the entire world inconsequential. She touches him and he is at the bottom of a swimming pool, everything blue tinged and somehow absent, unable to hurt him. Betty with her golden blonde hair and razor sharp brain, smarter than the rest of them and more ruthless, too, eyes flashing as she watches the prosecutor hammer Archie Andrews into a box that does not fit.

Loving her used to feel like cities burning down inside his chest, like something that was cracking him open from the inside. Circuits being rewired inside of him, a shift into something new. Forget the alcoholic father and the gone mother, forget the dead football player and absent baby sister, forget that he does not know how to love in a way that does not hurt.

Now, it is a steadying thing, a base pulse that he can always find his way back to, the tightrope of their topsy turvy lives.

She gets sick halfway through the summer, strung out on the trial and her her insane family, a flu that knocks her straight off her feet. Alice and Polly keep trying to feed her weird herbal remedies, so she comes to Sunnyside instead, flushed with fever and eyes an impossible glassy blue.

Jughead’s never been good at being nurturing, but he buys flat ginger ale from the shitty Southside convenience store and medicine to take down fever. They watch Chinatown in bed, even though Betty insists she’s going to get him sick, wearing one of his t-shirts with her hair snarled into a messy knot, pushing him away when she gets too hot and stealing body heat when the shivers come back.

She insists on going in to her internship and he knows better than to argue at her, even though every instinct is screaming for him to call Veronica in for backup, to insist that she absolutely cannot go in.

Instead, he goes in with her, watches as she powers through the relentless legal grind and passes her bottles of Gatorade, pretends to file papers for Mrs. Andrews while watching her from the corner of his eye.

The clock strikes five when she finally relents, curling herself into his side as they leave even though it’s much too hot out.

“Thank you,” she murmurs against his collarbone, and love remakes the marrow of him, the blood and skin cells and viscera.

 

iii. cheryl blossom

It’s the summer of forgetting.

Cheryl sits on the back of Toni’s bike and lets her hair snap out into the wind in dark red ribbons that segment the cloudless sky into abstract bursts of color.

It is here, hot leather from the bike, Toni’s perfume catching in the wind, a thousand miles stretched out in front of them, that she ceases to be _Cheryl Blossom,_ ceases to be the heiress with a dead brother and a mess of blood on her hands, ceases to be anything at all.

It’s an unfamiliar freedom, all that open road, all that space to be whoever it is that she wants. She’s still getting accustomed to it, a world where she does not need maximum defenses, a world where Toni is equally as delighted by her sharp barbs as she is by her soft, strange kindnesses.

 _Loving you is a crime I’m still learning how to commit,_ she whispers one night, as they’re leaving a hick bar with whiskey sloshed veins and laughter bubbling up through their chests, fingers linked together tightly, and Toni kisses her alabaster shoulder whispers _no, it’s not_ until she starts to believe it.

Toni is always warm, a molten, volcanic heat that is strong and steady enough to melt away memories of white dresses and ice cracked through with blood. Toni has cotton candy pink hair that tangles in her fingers and lip balm that tastes like campfire smoke and vanilla. Toni is the most riveting person she’s ever met, tiny but with enough gravitational force to knock the planets of her out of alignment.

They hadn’t even meant to go on a roadtrip, really.

Toni had to go to the border to make a supply run for the Serpents, and Cheryl had decided to accompany her, a day trip to take in the clean air and the maple trees that had made her her fortune generations ago.

A day trip had turned into a night, had turned into a weekend, a week, and at that point the both of them were itching for a change of scenery, so they hopped back on Toni’s bike and drove straight on past Riverdale, into a melted butter sunset that was practically rife with symbolism.

It’s impossibly reckless, a different recklessness than Cheryl is used to, that self-directed will to harm that dragged her out onto the ice, into the flames, under a bucket of sickly sweet fake blood. This is the sort of giddy teenage wildness that she’s never truly experienced, the both of them with only two changes of clothes, living off of Cheryl’s plastic American Excess in a series of worse and worse Holiday Inns.

The whole thing is decidedly unglamorous, but it’s the first time that she’s ever been happy, _truly,_ giddily happy, an unsteady and reckless joy that floods her body and spins her out like a top, ready for the next adventure, ready for sunrises and sunsets and all of the moments in between. It’s a happiness sharpened by fear, the knowledge that all of this could dissolve just as easily as it began.

They ride Toni’s motorcycle and get drunk in tacky bars and try to piece together constellations, the night sky defined by scattered pinpricks of light. They swap stories, talk until the dawn turns the sky an apocalyptic shade of pink and it is time to go again, to find a brand new world.

“It’s been an honor and privilege to love you,” Toni says one night when they’re sobering up in the predawn, banked out on the side of a river in some unimportant state. She’s half kidding, half solemn like a wedding vow, and when Cheryl kisses her there has never been anything better to exist, not in the entire world.

 

iv. veronica lodge

It is the summer of mourning.

Veronica feels it, an old fashioned sort of grief, like something from an Audrey Hepburn movie- a tragic misuderstanding, the framed golden boy, the rich girl who led him there.

“Dying for love is only romantic in the movies,” she told Archie once, drunk on gimlets from a speakeasy that is never going to happen,” and he had frowned, unimpressed with her cleverness.

“Dying for love is never romantic,” he had replied easily, and when he kissed her he tasted like water, no whiskey.

The truth is that there is nothing romantic about this sick, sweltering summer, the late nights she spends with the windows of her bedroom open and _Summertime_ on loop, _your daddy is rich and your mama is good looking._

The first night of Archie’s trial, after the prosecutor has grilled the only boy she’s ever loved for hours straight with the sort of grinding pressure that she can feel down to her teeth, after Veronica has gone home and sobbed in the shower so that her parents won’t hear, after Archie calls her and tells her that is going to spend the night with his parents, _sorry, Ronnie, they just really need me right now,_ Veronica goes to Betty’s house.

It’s half past three in the morning on a Tuesday, no less, and Veronica doesn’t quite know why she does it, what strange and mystical force it is that sends her creeping in through the Cooper’s perpetually locked basement door.

The light is off, but Betty is awake when she nudges the door open, eyes bright in the blue-black of the room. Something must tell in Veronica’s expression, because Betty doesn’t ask what she’s doing in her room in the middle of the night with no warning, just peels back the comforter. She’s never loved her best friend more, Betty’s unflinching acceptance of the mess inside everyone else’s head.

Veronica tucks herself into the cool, silky sheets, and she’s never missed Archie’s bed as terribly as she does in this moment- the scratchy cotton bedspread and bargain brand laundry detergent smell, the reassuring weight of an arm around her waist.

She folds her hands over her stomach and breathes in raggedly, the sound too loud in the quiet room.

“What was it like?” she asks into the stillness, voice very small and very unlike herself. “When you thought you lost Jughead.” The question needs no clarification.

Betty inhales once, softly, the sound the only thing in the quiet room. “It was like-” she starts, and then stops, eyes faraway and dreamy, caught in a private pain known only to herself. “It was like every light in the world went out.”

Veronica presses her face into the sharp crevice of Betty’s shoulder, inhaling her familiar scent of almond soap and warm vanilla.

 _What a terrible thing,_ she thinks to herself. _For a girl so terrified of darkness._ She thinks about losing Archie and understands.

Betty laces their fingers together under the sheets and squeezes, a little too tight, and the fragile thing in her chest cracks open, like emergency glass breaking. Veronica sobs once, a terrible, childlike sort of gasp, nothing like the crying in the movies she used to imitate, and her tears drip onto Betty’s collarbone.

“It’s gonna be okay, Ronnie,” Betty whispers to her softly, stroking her hair in the way that neither of their mothers ever did, and the lie is bitter in her mouth when she replies “I know.”

 

v. archie andrews

It is the last summer.

This, Archie knows. Even if he does not go away, even if the doors do not slam shut, even if he is able to go back to school and play football and escape out of that rapidly narrowing window. It’s the last summer of anything innocent, of being able to watch the sun wind through the sky and feel nothing at all.

The trial doesn’t knock him out of orbit the way that it probably should. Most of the time it feels like nothing more than a tv show that Veronica would scoff at- the weepy character testimonies and jagged cross questioning, his mother with her mouth pressed into a thin, severe line. He fiddles with his tie and breathes in and out, nodding in and out of indecipherable legal jargon.

The concept of prison is something that feels almost impossibly far away, a dark shadow in the corner of Augst, too terrible to be fully defined. He would rather not think about it, would rather not to watch the worry sink into the lines of his friend’s faces, their dark circles and the sweaty hair stuck to their temples, all their fervent hope made into something raw and desperate.

He doesn’t think about prison a lot, but it hits him sometimes, how close to the end he is. He’ll be watching his friends and it will hit him like a sharp slap, like something has wrenched open his chest and rearranged what was inside.

It’s unplaced, for no reason at all; the way Veronica cracks icecubes out of the tray, maybe, or how Jughead loops his shoelaces twice around the ankle before tying them, these nothing moments made suddenly severe. It will hit him like cold water to the spine, hair prickling at the back of his neck. He can sit in the courtroom and be called a killer no problem, but it’s the small, unmomentous gaps that crush him with a strange, brutal tenderness.

He has a father who will go to bat for him every time and a mother who will curl the law around her fingertips to keep him safe. He has one best friend who straightens his tie with nervous fingers and another who types his way into a better world.

He has a girl who unspools everything in his head and tastes like black cherry and swats at him with the strings of a yellow uniform, and, really, Archie Andrews considers himself rather lucky after all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading!!! pls know that all comments and kudos are deeply appreciated, and come hang on tumblr @flwrpotts


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